Lent urges us to focus more on God. Without sounding too negative, the many facets of the world today seem to make it for us a place of temptation, as the wilderness was the place of temptation, the refuge of the devil, for the desert monks of the early Christianity. Lent is the time of re-ordering, re-visioning in life, of re-establishing harmony after the chaos because to really experience harmony in the spirit, chaos must precede it. It is the destabilization that comes through the wilderness temptation that Jesus himself experienced at a point when "the time had come". Lent is the time for us to get the right perspective of things. Jesus words:"Repent and believe the Good News" mark a turning point, a fresh beginning under the sign of God's Covenant. The worst temptation we can experience in our deserts today is not to have hope. We live in dark times and there exist a sense of hopelessness and despair. Our dull inner life, the brick-walls we face, the sense of getting nowhere, are all acknowledged without panic because the focus is God's action not ours. it does not mean, however, that ahead there lies a life of easy confidence and surface peace.
